The End of a Worldview

The title of this post may be a little misleading. I am not talking about a particular worldview coming to an end. Instead, I would like to take a moment and talk about the results when a worldview is followed to its logical end. More specifically, I would like to talk about the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, and why atheists probably ought to be bent out of shape about it.

Ultron was created when an AI was repurposed from Loki's staff and successfully interfaced by Jarvis. Multiple times during the movie, one Avenger or another pointed out that Ultron had picked up a lot of his view on the world from Tony Stark. Presumably, the AI was listening when Tony told Banner about his vision for 'world peace'. As a result, Ultron took in all the information it could, set it against Tony's stated objective, and came to the interesting conclusion that the best way he could benefit the human race was to initiate an extinction-level event and see what survives and evolves from it.

Ultron was strongly written and played as a madman, and yet his plan was not utterly nonsensical. It was the logical end of secular environmentalism, unchecked by the basic humanity that defies even the atheists who prefer to believe that it does not exist. According to atheistic evolution, humanity is continuously improving through evolving. According to the history proposed by the theory of evolution, this planet has gone through a number of extinction-level events - catastrophies that wiped out all or nearly all life - and risen from each one better than the one before. In defiance of entropy, this worldview (when not seasoned by any other) insists that order comes from chaos.

Tony was interrupted in his plan to attack one AI with another. Ultron had uploaded part of his broken self into the new body. Parts of Jarvis had been uploaded as well. The body was created around one of multiple key stones which appear to represent elements; in this case, the Mind Stone. However, this time, Vision's earliest-heard words were words of caution from Steve Rogers (Captain America), and he was turbocharged into existence by Thor, with whom he apparently had some sort of special bond. (Thor was the first one convinced of Vision's benevolence, the one who enacted his plan with him, and the one who spoke to him at the end.) Now, if you are going to draw a line from "Most religious" to "Least Religious" and plot the Avengers along it, Tony Stark would sit at one end, and Thor and Captain America would sit at the other. Vision was very clearly influenced by the thoughts produced by taking the religious (particularly Christian) worldview to its natural end.

Though I have been comparing Vision and Ultron, this theme moves through the rest of the Avengers as well. Ultron is willing to sacrifice a few (the residents of the city) in order to sacrifice the many, in hopes of improving the whole. At first, the more atheistic members of the team (like Tony!) insist that the few may rightly be sacrificed in order to save the many. The more religious ones overrule them, and help them understand... each individual person is important. You cannot save 'humanity' by sacrificing the unwilling in a numbers game. As Rico correctly pointed out in the book Starship Troopers, in a question of the logistics in risking multiple people to rescue a fallen comrade, "Men are not potatoes."

When Ultron and Vision face off at the end of the movie, Vision says, "There is grace in [humanity's] failings. I think you missed that."